Obama goes dutch

With the economy the way it is and so many people taking pay cuts or just losing their jobs altogether, we are all looking for new ways to save some money. I can't say that any of you thought of charging guests for their meals. Thankfully the leader of our country is way ahead of you. President Obama invited the CEOs of Xerox, Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Honeywell to the White House for a meeting and a White House Staffer called each of the CEOs to find out their credit card information so they could all be charged for the cost of the food.

Last time I checked Obama wasn't from Pennsylvania, but the idea of each person paying from themselves in the PA part of the country is called "going dutch." I'm not sure how I feel about the president of the country I am a citizen of feeling that "going dutch" is not cheap and inhospitable(especially in your own house). Supposedly the reason behind this action was to avoid conflicting interests. I'm not so sure; maybe the White House needs a bailout plan and we just don't know about it.

My mom and I have been busy bees with all of the fruit that we have been acquiring lately. Our neighbor called and begged us to come and pick some of the peaches she had rotting on the tree. It was raining, but we decided that we didn't feel too wicked witch of the westy today and headed out. Once we got to our neighbor's house it was pouring. My mom and I starting grabbing the peaches like two 12 year olds stealing peaches. Every time I grabbed a peach the tree splashed me in the eye. We ended up with 2 bags of peaches, and went home to make a peach blueberry pie and blueberry muffins.

The blueberry tartlettes that I made in the picture might be a little difficult without the French tartlette pans my mom got me for my birthday last year, but you can make the same basic dessert minus the cute little crusts.

I used a coconut custard that is actually lactose free.

1 can of coconut milk
1/2 cup of sugar
1/4 cup of cornstarch

Pour all of the ingredients into a saucepan and cook over medium-high heat. Stir constantly, but remember cornstarch doesn't work until it boils so don't be afraid of a few lumps in the beginning. Let the mixture come to a full boil until the mixture is smooth and pure white. Pour the custard into a pie pan with a little bit of water in it. The water will keep the custard from sticking.

Once the custard is cool slide the custard out of the pan and cover the top with blueberries and mint leaves. It will be a beautiful refreshing way to spend a night with a friend. Just please don't charge your friend for the cost of the dessert. I promise it won't set you back too much.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

Recipes please

Like I promised I am full of recipes today. If you left the zucchinis on the vine a little too long, or if you were fortunate enough to pick up a baseball sized zucchini it is time for some zucchini bread. As you know I am a complete chocolate addict, so I add chocolate chips. If you prefer to be healthier just add the nuts and lead a boring life. If you really do have an overabundance of zucchini grate it all up, throw it in ziploc bags, and freeze it. That way when your friend has a baby in January and you want to bring something over for her to enjoy all you have to do is whip out this recipe and your frozen zucchini and make some bread with a taste of summer.

This recipe makes 2 loaves of bread. I wish you could see the paper it is on, because it's in my mom's handwriting and has spots all over it; definitely a recipe we use often.

4 cups of shredded zucchini (if you have a food processor with a nice attachment to do this go for it, if not watch your knuckles and get out the grater)
3 cups of flour
2.5 cups of sugar
1.25 cups of vegetable oil
4 eggs
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1.5 teaspoons salt
1.5 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup of chopped nuts
1 cup of chocolate chips

Mix all of the ingredients. Bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit until top is firm (if you don't have the knack for feeling your baked goods yet, puncture it with a toothpick).

After our blueberry picking extravaganza yesterday, we are all ready for a blueberry pie. My boyfriend is coming down and seems to think that he will be getting some of the pie, so I'm probably not going to make it till tomorrow since pies don't last very long in our house. I'm almost positive I've already put my crust recipe on here before but in case I haven't I use a 3-2-1 recipe that is so easy to remember.

3 cups of flour
2 cups of butter/shortening/lard
1 cup of ice cold water

Cut the butter into the flour. Add the water. Separate into thirds and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate or freeze till firm. You can cut this recipe into half or even 4ths. I normally cut it in half twice and end up with a shell and a lattice top.

4 cups of blueberries
1/2 cup of white sugar
2-3 tablespoons of cornstarch
2 teaspoons of nutmeg

Mix the cornstarch, sugar, and nutmeg in a bowl. Mix in the blueberries. Pour into the shell. I have been having issues with thickening pies lately. Make sure that even if the crust looks done the pie comes to a full boil. Cornstarch does not thicken unless the mixture boils, so don't take the pie out the minute the crust looks a little dark and there are a few bubbles.

A lot of recipes will tell you to bake at 400 for 20 minutes and then reduce to 350 for 40 minutes. You can do this, but on these hot summer days heating your oven up that much might not be on your agenda. It won't kill the pie to bake at 350 degrees for an hour. Just make sure the pie is bubbling and the crust looks done.

I'm sure you all have your own favorite summer produce recipes. If they aren't super secret family recipes, please share them. I'm sure we would all enjoy trying your blueberry pie or cake or muffins. If they are super secret family recipes please don't comment and leave a recipe with ingredients missing, that's just mean.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

Oversharing in a blueberry patch and other faux paus of blueberry picking

"There's so many big ones on the ground." In horror I watched a man in the aisle beyond us was stooping on the ground picking the birds leftover berries. I, being an incorrigible smart ass, loudly told my sister and mom that I hear all of the good ones are on the ground. My sister was horrified, knowing a lesson many of the people picking berries this morning did not know. Blueberry bushes are hardly soundproof.

We were in a rather thick patch of blueberries this morning. It might easily have been assumed that you could tell your blueberry picking buddy all about how you tend to eat food off of the ground that people step on and birds poo on, but in reality a veteran blueberry picker standing 3 aisles away will hear that comment and quite possibly snicker or put it in their blog. Either way oversharing in a blueberry patch is probably a bad idea. Maybe one day they will come up with soundproof bushes, but until then, remember, saying "it's been a while since me and grandma were in the bushes together," will be heard by more than just your fellow pickers.

I don't know how many of you have picked blueberries in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Picking down here is very different than in Maine where blueberry picking is done from bushes that are maybe a foot off the ground. Jersey and Pennsylvania berries grow in tall bushes that can become unruly sometimes. The bushes today were beyond unruly. If you were claustrophobic, you shouldn't have been picking at Schmidt's Berry Farm. As you can see from some of the pictures, we were pretty much buried in the bushes.

At the berry farm (doesn't that just sound like the happiest place on earth - the berry farm) my family goes to every year there is a system that each picker must adhere to. Everyone is given a row. You pick the row. You're supposed to pick every berry on the row, which is why I go first and my mom can pick the ones I miss. If you see scads of berries in another row you are not, I repeat are not supposed to skip over to that row and start hopping rows. Row hopping, while it sounds like a brilliant plan full of the best berries, is actually a surefire way to make another picker who is trying to follow the rules miss the good berries in their row. You may think that is their problem, but kharma is a terrible thing and your day will come. Pick your own berries and good fortune will come to you, or something like that.

We picked a lot of berries, as you can see from the pictures. It really was a ton of fun, and now we are going to bake a blueberry pie and freeze some of the berries so that in the middle of winter we can enjoy their fresh taste of summer.

I'm not sure when all of your seasons are, but I hope you are taking advantage of the fresh produce that is coming in and that you are taking the time to actually pick your own. The work makes the reward so much tastier. I'm pulling out my blueberry pie recipe tonight, so I will post that and the chocolate chip zucchini bread tomorrow.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

How to feed 100 people in 15 minutes

A kitchen is all about adaptation. When my arms are full, and I have to open the walk-in door there is a slim to none chance that someone will be there to help me out. I take on the flamingo stance using my leg to balance whatever I'm carrying while I open the door with the hand I just freed up.

Some people aren't terribly good at adapting. When the smoked salmon is too delicate they start tearing at it, ruining half of the pieces. When there is a stack of dishes too heavy to take back to the dishroom, they start asking for someone else to take it back instead of just dividing the stack in half or carrying the whole thing and not being a wimp. Those who aren't good at adapting tend to not last very long in the kitchen. It's easier to do the job and not listen to them complain and ask for help.

Yesterday me and the sous chef Rob were in the kitchen alone doing a party for a 100 people. It was supposed to be a cookout and Rob was supposed to stand at the grill in his finest country club attire so all of the lady golfers could feel like they were at a typical cookout (because typical cookouts normally involve a chef in a white coat, black pants, at a country club). Anyway Rob and I were ready for a quiet 4 hours of getting stuff and making sure everyone left happy. At 1:30 one of the waitstaff comes running in singing about how it's raining. The singing part was less on purpose and more of the way he speaks when he gets excited. It was amusing, but Rob was not sure whether he was going to have to move the whole proceeding inside or whether the ladies were going to want to eat immediately. The second option was rather scary, because none of the food was ready, and it shouldn't take 15 minutes to get food for 100 people together.

In all reality we would have had more than 15 minutes to get the stuff together, but the front of the house people putzed around a little and by the time we found out that we needed to do the food inside it was 2 and we had 15 minutes. Rob threw some burgers on the flat top(kind of like a giant skillet and by giant I mean bigger than the top of your oven). My job was to flip the burgers and as Rob said "mark them." Basically I threw 100 burgers on the flat top, made sure both sides looked done and ran them back to Rob so he could throw them in the oven till they were done.

Next to me was the grill. Rob was marking the chicken on the grill. He yelled back about 5 minutes into the process asking me if I knew how to put diamonds on the chicken. What a silly question; of course I didn't. I went to school for baking and pastry arts for goodness sake. I yelled yes, because like I said kitchens are about adapting and no is not a reasonable answer, and he said turn it a quarter turn. Unfortunately by the time he had yelled back the chicken was already over done and the marks weren't made, but the second time around I got it.

In 15 minutes time the people were eating. They ate quite a bit and we ran around like mad people trying to find the extra potato salad and some extra tuna salad. 40 minutes or so after we started the mad dash to get the food ready we were cleaning up.

There is nothing more satisfying than a job well done. All of the ladies were happy and fed and the fact that we did it in 15 minutes made me (I can't speak for Rob)feel like the magicians that people think everyone back in the kitchen are.

In other news my mom's garden is gorgeous. The zucchini are coming in and the cucumbers and beans. I can't tell you how excited I am to get my hands on the cucumbers and make some pickles. Some chocolate chip zucchini bread might be in order too; we will have to see. I'll be sure to add a recipe for that in the next post.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

A lesson in emulsification

This weekend one of the most patient line cooks at work decided it was time for me to make a vinaigrette. Ever since I started working at the country club this line cook has taken extra time and care to make sure that my lack of culinary knowledge does not mean that I lose a finger or get yelled at for being an idiot. Every week is normally a new lesson of some sort and this week Alice(that would be the line cook's name, or fake name, you will never know) got that excited look in her eyes like she knew I was going to make the family proud. I of course saw the look as a new way for Emily to mess something up while Alice watched.

She handed me the recipe for Balsamic Vinaigrette and I measured everything out; that part went almost smoothly except part of the cap for the balsamic tends to fall into the container and one of the other cooks saw it had fallen in and poured an unmeasured amount of Balsamic into my container to get it out. That crisis was averted thanks to Rob helping me with a little math.

The hard part about making a vinaigrette is that you must create an emulsification. Now Alice rattled off an excellent cooking definition of emulsification, but I tend to not write down definitions of things when I'm at work, so I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica for an easy definition. "In foods, any of numerous chemical additives that encourage the suspension of one liquid in another, as in the mixture of oil and water in margarine, shortening, ice cream, and salad dressing." So the part of the definition we're working with is salad dressing and we were trying to emulsify the balsamic with the oil (2 gallons of it to be exact).

Since the invention of vinaigrettes, a technological advance has been made that makes this whole emulsifying process a smidgen easier. This advance is the burr mixer. A burr mixer basically does what your hand going faster than the speed of light would do with a whisk. It really is brilliant because if I had the whisk while we made balsamic my hand might have fallen off.

The burr mixer I was going to use for the Balsamic was around 4 feet tall, and me being the short Emily that I am put the bucket on the table and then decided it would be a good idea to put the burr mixer in the bucket making the top of the burr mixer almost out of reach. Alice came over and quickly decided this was a bad idea, putting the bucket on the ground. As I said before Alice is probably the most patient person I know and she used the mixer while I slowly poured in the oil. The idea of an emulsification is that the oil is suspended in the balsamic, which is done through the movement, the air which your bringing into the mixture, and the steady stream of oil. I think I did a pretty steady stream. The balsamic vinaigrette turned out wonderful and my family was proud.

If you're looking at a recipe for a salad dressing or vinaigrette, don't be scared. Grab a whisk and maybe a helper and patiently pour the oil while whisking it into whatever other liquid your mixing with it. If a Betty Baker like myself can do it anyone can do it.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

Camel Milk and other unusual things that probably won't taste very good

Dubai's Al Nassma announced that they plan on selling their camel milk chocolate all over the Middle East with plans to move into a US market. After watching a rerun of Top Chef Masters last night I am a little more than skeptical about this plan.

I don't know if you've been keeping up this season; it actually has been an extreme disappointment, if you want my personal opinion. But last night they had all of the past Top Chef Master's on before the new one came on, so I caught up on what was going on. In the one episode a Swedish chef made a goats milk ganache as his dessert appetizer. Everyone hated it. The judges said it was awful. The people who they brought in said it was awful. I'm not sure what camel milk tastes like, but I have a feeling that it tastes closer to goat milk than it does cow milk.

Camel's milk has less fat in it, more vitamin C, and less insulin; I guess in some ways this makes it better than cow's milk. I'm sure that will be a selling point for the camel milk chocolate, but I really can't imagine it taking business from the loves of my life at Hershey. Actually the makers of the Camels Milk Chocolate said that they did not want to be in grocery stores; they wanted to think of themselves as "the Godiva of the Middle East."

I know I already told you about my history with milk, but I do have to wonder when drinking some other animal's milk becomes a little creepy. Would you drink your dog's milk, or your cats milk? I guess camel's milk just kind of creeps me out. I mean they spit dangerously; do you really want to be drinking the food that makes little camels spit dangerously? I am normally a proponent of adding chocolate to anything, but I think in this one instance it is just safer to add chocolate to cows milk. We know it tastes good, so why fiddle with a good thing.

Now that we settled the cow milk/ camel milk debate, it is time to make some truffles. Please don't go out and buy goat's milk or camel's milk for that matter; buy some good old fashioned heavy cream. I use a 2 to 1 ration for my ganache to make truffles, so if you buy a cup of heavy cream chop up a half a cup of chocolate (white, dark, or milk). If you are having a creative sort of day, infuse the milk. Pour the milk into a saucepan. You can add some cinnamon to make a Mexican truffle, or a little cayenne pepper for a spicy truffle. If you have fresh mint growing you could bruise some and put it in, or try a refreshing orange truffle by putting orange peel into the milk. Bring the cream to a boil. If you are infusing it make sure you do this slowly so the flavors are given the chance to seep in. Have the chocolate all chopped and ready to go. Once the cream comes to a boil strain it if you infused it, and pour it over the chocolate. Have a whisk ready to go and whisk. I know you have watched shows and movies where chefs whisk vigorously and just splash the contents of the bowl all over. It works for them; it won't work for ganache.

Whisk the center; don't bring the sides in until you have a nice emulsion. How do you know when you have a nice emulsion? Well it will look like smooth chocolate. Once you have this in the center of the bowl you can move your whisk out a little more to bring in some of the contents of the sides of the bowl.

Chocolate is a mysterious and beautiful thing. Many cultures believed it to have powers. I had a chef who told us that if he told the chocolate to not like us it wouldn't matter how much we tried we wouldn't be able to temper the chocolate. "You must love the chocolate and it will love you back." I never had a problem with this, but remember when you are making your truffles chocolate is a thing of love. Take your time and love the chocolate. Once your ganache is beautiful and shiny and all emulsified together, pour it into a pan. The only reason I say to do this is because it will cool evenly this way. If you are in no rush leave it in the bowl. Put it in the refrigerator. Once it is hard, take it out and scoop/spoon out truffle balls. Roll the balls if you are not using a scoop or if it proves to be difficult to scoop out. Roll the truffles in cocoa power, eat them as they are, or dip them in chocolate(if they make it that long).

As a final side note to food that I deem untasty, the Taco Bell dog died yesterday at the age of 15. While I have never been a fan of the meat mush Taco Bell seems to think is worthy of calling food, I do send my condolences to the dog's owner and to a chain that turned Mexican food into the worst form of fast food I have ever consumed.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily

11 Herbs and spices code cracked?

Ron Douglas is probably one of my boyfriend's favorite people next to me of course. I think I was dating him for hardly a week when he started sending me the link to recipesecrets.net. "You can make a McDonalds milkshake!" My boyfriend was dating a pastry chef and he was sending me the recipe for a McDonalds milkshake. And people wonder why most Americans don't appreciate good food anymore.

In all fairness there really is something to be said for being able to make something you really like in a restaurant at home. It is pretty impressive to be able to have the taste and knowledge to know how to duplicate a recipe. Of course, what my boyfriend failed to recognize, was that the person who originally created the milkshake was actually far more impressive than this man who, at times, used shiesty methods to crack famous recipes.

Douglas was a finance manager who saw a need. He wanted to learn the KFC secret recipe and in his internet wanderings he found a whole lot of people who wanted to learn their favorite restaurants secret recipes. Douglas started his website, recipesecrets.net, and began cracking the codes. He used every tactic imaginable from feigning food allergies to ordering takeout in order to dissect the food in the privacy of his home. He actually did succeed and began selling his recipes. He quit his job, hired two cooks to help him out, and got a book deal with Simon and Schuster who just recently published his first book of recipes.

Douglas started looking for KFC's original recipe, and in this book it looks like he has cracked the code. Surprisingly KFC is not terribly worried; I guess a lot of people claim to crack their code. Douglas is pretty good though. Just ask my boyfriend, supposedly that milkshake tasted just like it did at McDonalds. Honestly I can't imagine that even if Douglas cracked the code KFC would lose much business. Not many people want to go through all of the work to make what they could buy in 5 minutes. Still the idea of the Colonel's secret recipe cracked is pretty impressive.

Douglas's book America's Most Wanted Recipes is actually only $9 on amazon.com. That's a lot less than it would cost you to go out to eat, so maybe give it a shot, stay in and try some of the recipes that your favorite restaurants would feed you if you felt like spending the money. All of us have more time with the economy the way it is, so it couldn't hurt to give it a try. If you try the KFC recipe, let me know how it goes.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily